There was a time zone question in OTG that prompted me to wonder how many people here would like to see Daylight Savings Time eliminated. I certainly do. Here's a cheesy website with some information, including all the places where normal people live within States and Territories of the United States:

Arizona
Hawaii
The eastern time zone portion of Indiana
Puerto Rico
the U.S. Virgin Islands
American Samoa_________________if i never try anything, i never learn anything..
if i never take a risk, i stay where i am..

I actually thought about posting a similar poll. I love DST, and I wish that it were in force year-round. I am not much of a morning person, and I appreciate it being light later in the evening much more than it being light earlier in the morning. In Tokyo in the summer, it gets light before 4 in the morning. Who enjoys this? I keep hoping that Japan will see the light and adopt DST._________________For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

Working nightshift most of my life, all the time change really means to me is having to work an extra hour in the fall and working an hour less in the spring. Oh, and usually half the morning staff is late when the time springs forward and they forget to set their clocks an hour ahead.

Well, it makes planning a lot easier if we can just assume that everyone's hours stay the same year round. But while our hours may stay the same, the hour of sunrise is variable. Rather than make small children go to school in near darkness, we have elected to roll the clocks back when it starts getting dark at 7AM. So I guess I'm for it.

I voted yes, mainly because I want the uselessness of jacking with clocks stopped. I don't care which way it goes, though I doubt DST would be adopted as THE time._________________lolgov. 'cause where we're going, you don't have civil liberties.

My opinion is basde entirely on the fact that I'm a programmer. I have pulled out more hair in dealing with daylight savings and timezones, and particularly the fact that different countries use different DST rules!

If there were just some standard, I'd gripe less. But with Indiana, and Arizona not cooperating in the US, and some countries using 2-hour shifts rather than 1-hour shifts, and everyone and their dog starting on different days, I'm ready to axe the whole system....

Making international software sucks when timing is important (I'm working on international shipment-tracking software for a major US automaker...) Yarrghhh.

All you folks whining about setting your clocks back get no sympathy from me. _________________Linux user off and on since circa 1995

I vote to do away with DST. I hate fiddling with every clock in my apartment twice a year. Plus it just seems rediculous to me to follow a modified time standard so we can get the most light out of it. Icky.

It's a dinosaur of WWII, and should be retired as such. What does it gain us? Extended daytime hours mean nearly nothing in this age of relativism, only that some have to wait to come out until later so they don't burn up....

In computer terms, it's a workaround, not a fix. In the WWII era, they wanted more time to get things done during the day, as lighting technology was not nearly so advanced. So, they said, "We'll pretend" and we all know that pretending to fix a problem doesn't do anything -- it still remains. We now have the technology and society that make it possible to break free of the biannual foolishness.

Actually the WWII may have been its origin, but isn't why it's still in use. It's used because it actually does save a fair amount of electricity. By adjusting the clock to better make use of sunlight, there is less demand for lighting during the peak usage evening time. (when many kitchens, televisions, and so on are running at full tilt).

That's the reason some countries want to do 2 hour daylight savings shifts, to reap even *more* reductions in electrical usage... Other countries have talked about doing DST year-round, effectively moving every day one hour!

But it's just a pain from an electronics standpoint.. It's like a mini Y2K bug happening every year! Automated tracking systems, punchclocks, anything that does sorting by time, and so on... all have to cope with freaky local rules for when DST is needed..._________________Linux user off and on since circa 1995

This is why I set the system clocks of all my machines, and store all dates in every system I design, in UTC. Conversion to local time is done by the UI or presentation layer: I never store localtime internally._________________For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

This is why I set the system clocks of all my machines, and store all dates in every system I design, in UTC. Conversion to local time is done by the UI or presentation layer: I never store localtime internally.

Which is also the way we are implementing it in the application I'm working on in my day job. Oracle 8 didn't have any builtin timezone information, so we were converting everything to UTC before sticking it into the database. Each user could set their profile to a certain timezone or "local to event" (since this project was tracking shipment movement all over the globe). We'd just convert at the last moment just for the presentation...

Oracle 9 now has native TZ functions so was can store our timestamps with the local TZ, rather than have to convert to UTC. But I think O9i is relatively unique in this.. certainly smaller dbs like mysql and access don't support this..._________________Linux user off and on since circa 1995

Oracle 9 now has native TZ functions so was can store our timestamps with the local TZ, rather than have to convert to UTC. But I think O9i is relatively unique in this.. certainly smaller dbs like mysql and access don't support this...

Is this really a useful feature? It seems like a lot of work for nothing to me. Don't you still have discontinuities when DST comes and goes? Wouldn't sorts still get confused?_________________For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

Is this really a useful feature? It seems like a lot of work for nothing to me. Don't you still have discontinuities when DST comes and goes? Wouldn't sorts still get confused?

It handles all of that, seamlessly as far as we can tell. It maintains internal (system) tables with TZ and DST rules. You can keep them updated from Oracle. When storing a date, you just supply a datetime and what timezone it's in, and from that point on, you can retrieve it in any timezone you want.

It's fast too. We did some speed comparos between O8i with *our* date routines and O9i with the native ones, and theirs is much faster than writing your own. It's really slick.. it basically is like "you just give us the info you know, and we'll take care of the rest"...

We've been using it (9i) for like 6 months now and have it running in production, so if it wasn't working, we'd have heard about it by now....

I only wish the ColdFusion front end we're using was as bright.... I wrote all the date and time format conversion routines since CF can't quite handle arbitrary formats. I'm a regex god now. _________________Linux user off and on since circa 1995

I'm in favor of having the same time all year round, set to standard time (winter time). As much as I hate morning, I think that noon should roughly correspond to the traditional idea of noon (when the sun crosses the meridian). Also, that would make the time between sunrise and noon approximately the same as the time between noon and sunset. As an alternative to having savings time all year, I'd prefer that work and school schedules be adjusted to something more natural.

Also, having DST all year presents a safety problem. I've heard kids tend to get run over when going to school in the dark. Also, the way the work/school day is arranged currently is completely unnatural. Your body is not designed to a) wake up before it gets light, or b) go to sleep before it gets dark. There is a lag time between when light hits your face and the associated hormones wake you up naturally. Parents and teachers always complain that kids come in to school acting like zombies and never eat breakfast. Children and teens need an hour or two more sleep than adults (growing bodies and minds), AND their circadian cycle is shifted forward, yet we expect them to get started EARLIER than most adults working the 9-5 or 8-5 job (when I went to High School, classes started around 7:30am).

On the other hand, I'm way in favor of the 28 hour day._________________"An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head."
-- Eric Hoffer

Another thing that complicates this discussion is that one's opinion is probably dependent on one's latitude and relative position within the timezone. I grew up in Seattle, where it would stay light until well after 9PM in the summer. That's on the trailing edge of its timezone, and at 47 degrees N. When I moved to Tokyo, which has no DST, is on the leading edge of its timezone, and is closer to the equator down at 35.5 N, it doesn't stay light past 7PM even on the longest days._________________For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

For those wondering, the reference longitude for your timezone is equal to 15 degrees times your offset from GMT. For example, the reference longitude for Eastern time is 5*15, or 75 degrees West. For every degree you are away from that, your solar time (the time that it would seem to be according to the position of the sun) is four minutes off. I'm quite close to 83 degrees West longitude, so my local solar noon is at about 12:32pm. During the summer, it's shifted an additional hour forward, 1:32pm. To someone in Augusta, ME, local solar midnight happens around 11:39pm during the winter.

In other words, I have it rougher in the morning than those east of me in my time zone, and therefore deserve to be coddled._________________"An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head."
-- Eric Hoffer

Is this really a useful feature? It seems like a lot of work for nothing to me. Don't you still have discontinuities when DST comes and goes? Wouldn't sorts still get confused?

It handles all of that, seamlessly as far as we can tell. It maintains internal (system) tables with TZ and DST rules. You can keep them updated from Oracle. When storing a date, you just supply a datetime and what timezone it's in, and from that point on, you can retrieve it in any timezone you want.

It's fast too. We did some speed comparos between O8i with *our* date routines and O9i with the native ones, and theirs is much faster than writing your own. It's really slick.. it basically is like "you just give us the info you know, and we'll take care of the rest"...

We've been using it (9i) for like 6 months now and have it running in production, so if it wasn't working, we'd have heard about it by now....

I only wish the ColdFusion front end we're using was as bright.... I wrote all the date and time format conversion routines since CF can't quite handle arbitrary formats. I'm a regex god now.

Thank you
Oracle 9i has actually become very stable and really fast, esp. 9.2.0.2.

We have introduced a lot of new time functionality, as mooman talked about. For thos who have access to MetaLink check out this note for more information on date and time in 9i.

I understand the argument for daylight savings time -- it forces people to get up an hour earlier and go to bed an hour earlier, so they waste less daylight in bed in the morning and burn less power at night.

But I haven't seen a *recent* study saying that it's worthwhile overall. You have to balance the power savings against all that futzing with clocks and software, the extra confusion when people cross time zones, etc.

Besides, it's a disgusting hack.

Get rid of it, and just encourage businesses to open and close earlier in the summer.